Donald Trump called AI safety researchers a "HOAX" conspiracy, banned three major news outlets from the White House, and is spending Justice Department resources to convince Americans that 100 documented cases of non-citizen voting over 25 years constitutes a national security crisis. Harvard's leading expert on how democracies die has a name for all of this, and it's not subtle.
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Steven Levitsky, Harvard professor of government and co-author of How Democracies Die, did not mince words when The Guardian asked him about Trump's escalating pattern of conspiracy-based attacks on critics. "Conspiracies are page one of the repressive playbook," he said, and then rattled off the historical company Trump is keeping: Mao, Stalin, Putin.
That's the list. That is the actual list a Harvard scholar reached for.
Levitsky's point wasn't just rhetorical. He noted that authoritarian leaders use conspiracies specifically because they don't require evidence. You allege. You repeat. You let the accusation do the work. The conspiracy doesn't need to be true to be useful. It needs to be loud, and it needs to paint whoever is criticizing you as not just wrong, but dangerous.
Roy Cohn's Best Student
Princeton historian Julian Zelizer connected the dots that Trump has been careful never to connect himself. Trump spent years in the 1980s mentored by Roy Cohn, the infamous right-wing lawyer who made his name as the engine behind Joseph McCarthy's Red Scare witch hunts in the 1950s. According to Zelizer, that apprenticeship left a very specific mark.
"Trump, mentored by Roy Cohn, learned that baseless allegations about shady forces working against him could serve to mobilize and lead the public to see him as a victim rather than a wrongdoer," Zelizer told The Guardian. The mechanism is the same every time: criticism arrives, conspiracy departs. Media asks hard questions about AI policy? Vast conspiracy. Scientists raise alarms about climate change? Hoax. Lost the 2020 election? The whole system is rigged.
Zelizer was direct about the downstream damage. "Trump's frequent use of conspiracies to attack critics has a damaging impact on all levels of society and democracy, from weakening confidence in elections to hurting our ability to deal with serious problems involving the AI industry." That last part is worth sitting with. This isn't just abstract harm to democratic norms. It's a concrete obstacle to the country handling real, consequential problems.
The AI Hoax That Wasn't a Hoax
In mid-September, Trump charged that AI leaders and safety researchers were engaged in a big "conspiracy" and perpetrating a "HOAX" by urging safeguards against potential extinction-level threats from unregulated AI. Read that sentence again slowly.
The people saying "maybe we should have guardrails on technology that could kill everyone" are the conspiracy theorists. Trump, meanwhile, declared himself the best "guardrail" against AI threats, while simultaneously dismissing the people whose entire job is studying those threats. He also took a swing at critics of data centers, calling them people who "want to end up being backwards and poor." This is the intellectual framework being applied to one of the most consequential technological transitions in human history.
Former federal prosecutor Ty Cobb, who served as special counsel in Trump's own first-term White House, did not try to put lipstick on it. "Trump denies, denigrates and demeans his foes by painting them as part of a conspiracy," Cobb told The Guardian. "He resorts to abject fabrications in response to any criticism or resistance."
The Press Ban and the Judge Who Said No
On September 21st, Trump took the conspiracy playbook into a new arena and barred CNN, Politico, and MS Now from White House access. His Truth Social explanation was characteristically unhinged, describing the press as a threat that has "grown like Cancer" in America, calling it "corrupt, purposeful, pervasive, fully coordinated, and totally out of control" and demanding it be stopped "NOW!"
The three outlets jointly filed a First Amendment lawsuit the same day. A federal judge in DC ruled on September 23rd that the administration had to immediately return their press credentials, and that the punitive action was probably unconstitutional. Two days. It took two days for a federal court to look at this and say, no, obviously not.
The speed of that legal rebuke says something. This wasn't a close call. This was an administration doing something so blatantly outside constitutional bounds that a judge moved fast.
100 Cases, 25 Years, One 'Crisis'
The election fraud conspiracy deserves its own special attention, because the numbers involved are genuinely staggering in how thin they are. Trump has built a significant piece of his second-term political project around the claim that non-citizen voting poses a "crisis of election security." He said it in a nationally televised speech on July 16th. His Justice Department is devoting real resources to it.
The conservative Heritage Foundation, not exactly a liberal institution, has documented 100 cases of non-citizen voting over a 25-year period. Across the entire United States. One hundred. The Guardian found that figure, and it sits there, quietly devastating the entire premise.
Barbara McQuade, a former US attorney who now teaches law at the University of Michigan, told The Guardian she sees a specific strategy in all of this. "It seems that the Trump administration is grooming the electorate to believe that the fall election will abound with fraud," she said. She laid out the possible purposes: pretext for seizing voting equipment, voter intimidation targeting likely Democratic voters, or simply poisoning public confidence in any result that doesn't go the right way. "All of it," she said, "is harmful to democracy."
The Dingo Take
What exactly does it take for the pattern to become undeniable? Trump has now called climate science a hoax, called AI safety concerns a hoax, called election results a hoax, and declared the free press a cancer on the republic requiring emergency suppression. At what point does the person watching all of this from the couch go: okay, maybe the Harvard professor who literally wrote the book on how democracies die has a point?
The conspiracy machinery described by Levitsky, Zelizer, McQuade, and Cobb isn't subtle. It doesn't even pretend to be. It's the same move, every time, applied to every domain where reality produces inconvenient findings: someone is lying, someone is conspiring, and that someone is whoever just said something Trump didn't like. Scientists, journalists, prosecutors, election officials, AI researchers, federal judges. The list of people allegedly conspiring against Donald Trump now includes most of the institutions a functional society depends on.
A federal judge reversed the press ban in 48 hours. The Heritage Foundation's own data eviscerates the non-citizen voting panic. Courts have rejected the 2020 fraud claims hundreds of times. The evidence keeps piling up on one side of the ledger, and the conspiracy claims keep piling up on the other. Mao and Stalin found that playbook useful too. That's the sentence we're living in right now.
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